In
December, 2002, over 100 protestors who have either no access, or
very limited access to their children, dressed
as Father Christmas
and sang in the office lobby of one of the most senior and important
functionaries in the government of the United Kingdom, Lord
Chancellor.
You might say it was an “uphill” battle from there, as
Fathers-4-Justice
went to extraordinary
“heights” to make their plight known:
that there are millions of fathers around the world who, by law, are
not allowed to see their children and have been treated unfairly by
courts. Why? Because they got divorced from their wives. Any other
reason? No.

Every
time I have a conversation with someone “new” to these
conceptually difficult-to-understand facts, I get the same response:
“Why?” This one-word question keeps my hope for mankind
strong, as it reinforces what I desperately want to believe –
that individuals still attempt to use reason as their first reaction
to a lack of understanding. Unfortunately for Fathers-4-Justice,
it’s usually “downhill” from there.

Writing
about a 1964 protest at Berkeley where university students staged
“sit-in” protests in the administration building, famed
novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand
opined in 1965 that “[p]olitically, mass civil disobedience is
appropriate only as a prelude to civil war – as the declaration
of a total break with a country’s political institutions.”
It made me think: what would Rand, who relished the hero and
despised “sacrifice,” have thought about Spiderman
and Batman
as they leapt tall cranes and palaces in a single bound?

Rand
stated that “[t]he student rebellion is an eloquent
demonstration of the fact that when men abandon reason, they open the
door to physical force as the only alternative and the inevitable
consequence.” Merriam-Webster defines reason as “a
rational ground or motive.” Fathers-4-Justice claims in their
Blueprint
for Family Law in the 21st Century
that “100 children everyday lose all or partial contact with a
natural parent,” and also claims that, for 40 of those
children, the “parent/child relationship will be completely
severed” within 2 years. I think it would be quite difficult
for anyone, including the most ardent
supporters of these laws,
to claim that an outcome where one child loses a parent every 15
minutes through no fault of their own would be considered rational.

Down
the rabbit hole

The
individuals new to this terror always have a hard time believing U.S.
government statistics
that indicate mothers consistently and overwhelmingly receive
preferential treatment in nationwide custody “awards”
(i.e., mothers receive custody 72% of the time, whereas fathers
receive custody 9% of the time, and joint custody is declared 16% of
the time). “I can’t believe it” they commonly
respond, or “I thought that everyone gets joint custody unless
you don’t want it.” (Rand used to call that faking
reality, referring to evasion as the typical modern weapon.) Rather
than pointing you to toward the “rabbit hole” of why this
is occurring, Rand would likely suggest that your search for the
truth start by asking the most critical question: who stands to
profit? (a.k.a., follow the money). (As an aside, I’ve been
told that Alice
in Wonderland
was Lewis Carroll mocking the legal profession.)

Granted,
Rand thought that “there are the nihilists who, moved by a
profound hatred, seek nothing but destruction for the sake of
destruction.” But, pursuing those motives in this topic would
take us down a conspiracy
theory
tangent that would make some of you roll your eyes (e.g., these
judges hate them for being good fathers; fathers elucidate everything
that the state does poorly, like providing food, shelter, and safety;
these fathers are providing a morally correct path; the state desires
what fathers provide – they can't emulate it, so they prefer to
destroy it). In referring to The
Age of Envy,
Rand explained: “[i]f a child wants to get good grades in
school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate
the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man
regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and
begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that
is hatred of the good.” Rand continued: “They do not
want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want
to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they
want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence…”
Let’s not go there right now.

Father
knows best

Rand
had somewhat mixed, but consistent views of civil disobedience.
“Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and
if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court,
as a test case.” In her opinion, “[s]uch an action
involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a
particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to
be unjust.” In the case of Fathers-4-Justice, that attack is
on a particular law known as “the
best interest of the child.”
(In America, all 50 states have a “best interest of the child”
law implementing the process that leads to the previously discussed
statistics that separate parents from children.) Rand supported
civil disobedience for individuals or groups “when and if the
risks involved are their own.”

Is
the plight of these “super
hero dads”
credible? During and after a divorce, the so-called “best
interest of the child” statutes allow a judge to make any
decision that he feels is “best” for the child.
According to the states, judges are given this ultimate power to
protect children. What either of the parents have to say about this
decision is “irrelevant.” However, in 1972, the U.S.
Supreme Court stated in a very
well-known Illinois case:

“What is the state interest
in separating children from fathers without a hearing designed to
determine whether the father is unfit in a particular disputed case?
We observe that the State registers no gain towards its declared
goals when it separates children from the custody of fit parents.
Indeed, if [he] is a fit father, the State spites its own articulated
goals when it needlessly separates him from his family… The
State’s interest in caring for [his] children is de minimis if
[he] is shown to be a fit father.”

In
other words, the U.S. Supreme Court thinks that separating a fit
father from his children is not in their best interest. Therefore,
these laws do not value the best interest of the child – they
value its destruction. Fathers-4-Justice refers to these “family”
judges who separate them from their children as tyrants. In speaking
about tyranny, Rand referred to what she called the ”ultimate
penalty” for tyrants: “[a] dictatorship has to
promulgate some sort of distant goals and moral ideals in order to
justify its rule and the people's immolation; the extent to which it
succeeds in convincing its victims, is the extent of its own danger;
sooner or later, its contradictions are thrown in its face by the
best of its subjects: the ablest, the most intelligent, the most
honest.”

However, Rand was adamant that
“there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the
kind of mass civil disobedience that involves a violation of the
rights of others – regardless of whether the demonstrators’
goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means.”
Rand was passionate that “[n]o one’s rights can be
secured by the violation of the rights of others.” To her,
“[m]ass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights:
it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.” Referring
to the student “sit-in,” she proselytized that “[t]he
forcible occupation of another man’s property or the
obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of
rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of
morality.”

Do
you hear me? Do you care?

I
don’t know about you but, when I was growing up, it didn’t
take much for me to listen to my
father
(the mere threat of being grounded made my ears quickly perk up).
Now-a-days, you might say it takes a little more than threats to get
a father’s message heard. Let’s look at a small
sampling from
Fathers-4-Justice’s resume: a condom
of purple flour
landing on British Prime Minister Tony Blair (just recently, a
purple egg missed him);
6 days atop a 100-foot
high crane
near the Tower Bridge in London closing roads and causing long
diversions for traffic; storming
a courtroom
in the England family court; placing banners on gantries of major
thoroughfares
that caused significant traffic congestion; trespassing on a balcony
at Buckingham Palace;
gluing
the locks and entrances
of 80 Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service offices
and family court buildings (not to mention the office
of the education secretary);
handcuffing a protestor to Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge
(they called it “a
citizen’s arrest”);
rotten
fish
and other foul smelling material posted through lawyers’ doors
(the Fathers-4-Justice international coordinator referred to it as
“air freshener”); a protest that stopped a popular
tourist attraction called the London
Eye.

Can
we really take them seriously? Before Fathers-4-Justice, the family
law atmosphere was one of contempt. Now, people are finally taking
notice (gosh – even the New
York Times).
Fathers-4-Justice thinks that, with such a “publicity
campaign,”
people will have more concern for their suffering and, more
importantly, their children's suffering. All actions were clearly
designed to bring massive attention to the government’s direct
destruction of the father/child relationship. (Granted, these
atrocities destroy
the relationships between mothers and their children
as well, though the number of these cases is much, much fewer, as the
government
statistics
prove.) Technically and objectively, I would strongly support the
contention that these actions by Fathers-4-Justice were “a
violation of the rights of others.”

But
he hit me first!

But,
what would Rand say? Probably “what did you expect – is
not the world rational?” These are rebels against conformity
to the destruction of children. Rand was emphatic in her views that
physical force was only justified in self-defense. So, let’s
look at the undisputable facts: millions
of fathers
are removed from their children’s lives even though they have
never abused or neglected them (what the U.S. Supreme Court refers to
as being a
“fit” parent).
These second-class parents are typically relegated with the
severance package of every other weekend visitation (if that).
(Reminds me of a quote I once read: “There is no such thing as
visitation between a parent and a child.”) To add insult to
injury, millions
of fathers
(who the Office of Child Support Enforcement nebulously refers to as
“cases”),
who have consistently provided their children’s food, safety,
and shelter, are threatened with jail
time
if they don’t give a significant portion of their monthly
earnings and assets to their ex-wives without any say as to how that
money gets spent. As John
Galt
stated in Atlas
Shrugged
(Rand’s most famous treatise on morality): “[f]orce and
mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”

Fair
enough, some will say; but Rand also detested sacrifice. What could
be more demonstrable of sacrifice that a Father-4-Justice
crusader going to jail
so that people will listen to his message? Hmmmm… what would
Rand think about that?

John
Galt had something very interesting to say about sacrifice: “If
a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for
herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the
hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value
is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only
from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his freedom, it is
not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a
sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing. If a man refuses to sell
his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man
who has no convictions.” Did you ever consider that the
Fathers-4-Justice individuals, who literally risk life-and-limb to
get back into their children’s lives, actually value their
relationships with their children more than staying out of jail or
falling off a gantry? Hmmmm…

Rand
spoke through John Galt that “[a] sacrifice is the surrender of
a value.” Rand also said that “[v]alues are that which
one acts to gain and/or keep.” Sounds to me like
Fathers-4-Justice refuses to surrender their children (i.e., their
values). Ergo, by the transitive
property…

Justice
is coming

The
reward for these defenders of children is jail, yet they remain
loyal, no matter what the circumstances. Fathers-4-Justice is intent
on reaching out to the millions of fathers who each feels
individually impotent before the enormity of the problem. They are
screaming to the best within these fathers, who have been bankrupted
by corrupt
judges,
had their children stolen from them, had their relationships
destroyed, and are reminded of it all every day that 20 – 70%
of their wages
are forcefully removed
from their paychecks purportedly to support their children that they
have never financially neglected. Their children are their
inspiration – can there be anything more morally defensible
than that?

Fathers-4-Justice
members are raising
their voices
(as well as their bodies) in the name of justice. These fathers are
not asking for compassion – they are demanding justice. To
these fathers, justice matters. Fathers-4-Justice, who will soon
launch
in the U.S.,
includes the exceptions
to those that are perishing in silence
and lonely agony of resignation to a childless life of despair. Over
225 years ago, American men readied their courage when they heard the
cries
through the Concord, Massachusetts streets
that “The British are coming! The British are coming!”
Today, American fathers are once again readying their courage as
those cries are echoed again. However, this time, these British and
American men (a.k.a. “non-custodial parents”) are on the
same side fighting against the oldest of evils: tyranny.